As humans, we love to be creative and create something. Making art can feel fulfilling whether you make it for yourself or share it with others. But problems come when you make it for other people. If you want your art to make people feel something, you need to make sure your art can be reached by people. You need to make your art discoverable.
Being a writer myself, I must admit how difficult it is to write when the burden of how to make my writing discoverable weighs me down. In the days of the internet, everything that we consume online is dictated by algorithms. Different platforms can have different algorithm designs and as people who create art, we need to learn how to work with the algorithm.
I don’t know about other writers’ experiences, but I find algorithm a dictator who limits my creativity by showing me what’s popular within the public sphere and how I need to stay relevant within what’s popular to be discoverable. For example, writing blogs drives me nuts. Not about the writing itself, but the stress over writing an article that’s SEO-optimized.
When I started blogging a few years back, I learned that a blog post needs to be SEO-optimized, or, in other words, optimized to rank top in the search engine. It is an entire technical mumbo jumbo that I honestly never wanted to dig deeper into.
Every time I wrote an article, instead of freely pouring my ideas onto a blank page, I became so focused on highlighting key points that can be used to rank my post in the search engine. Or I became so focused on making what sentence I can write to make my post searchable, even though sometimes I don’t really feel the sentence makes sense.
Another thing I hate is considering how much time I need to spend on social media platforms like X or Instagram to engage with potential readers. This means another algorithm to learn, and a few hours being wasted on social media engagements.
I’m not that active on any social media to say this, but I’ve watched a few videos on why artists are quitting social media, and most of them mention how social media engagement is essentially meaningless. It doesn’t create deep conversations, instead, just the number of likes on posts which will get drowned in the bottem of the internet after a few days.
If we think of how social media can boost algorithms, and factor in social media engagement that falls short with time, trying to have loyal audiences on those platforms seems impossible.
Now, back to the hard work to feed the algorithm. You may think that I’m just too lazy to do all the hard work to make my article discoverable. I’m going to be honest here. Yes, I am. I’m too lazy to think about the technical skills that I need to have just to make my article discoverable.
Honestly, almost a quarter of my writing time—by writing, I mean not just articles, but also my novel project and short stories—is used to worry about whether I’m writing something that appeals to most people. Which, in today's era, is also determined by the algorithm.
For example, if you’re an avid romance novel reader, there’s a chance that you’ll buy a romance novel online. Your purchasing data is stored by the search engine for future searches. Then, the algorithm will start pushing romance novel content on your Google search, on your TikTok, or Instagram reels.
You have a lower chance of encountering new genres, especially the non-popular ones.
The URLs, the image, metadata, keywords. All play roles in the Google search. I don’t know about TikTok or Instagram, but I certainly don’t have the time (and the energy) to understand all of them.
Honestly, for me, it’s not exaggerating when I say the algorithm killed my creativity. Because for so long, I’ve stopped writing blogs under too much pressure of doing it “for the algorithm”. I make art for people, not for machines. I’ve stopped overthinking who would read my blog. I’ve stopped worrying about how I would reach my future readers if I don’t engage with them on social media. Where should I share my work? How would Instagram or Google algorithm respond to it?
Now, when I reflect on it, I prefer to just let my creativity flow. I feel freer, I don’t feel restricted like before, and therefore, things that I say are authentic.
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